I. F.

Stone: Asking The Necessary Questions

January 22, 1989|By Reviewed by Michael R. Beschloss, historian and author of ``Mayday`` and ``Kennedy and Roosevelt.``

The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950-1951

By I.F. Stone

Little Brown, 369 pages, $17.95

For half a century, I. F. Stone has been an indispensable corrective to American pack journalism. Born in Haddonfield, N. J. in 1907, he wrote for the Nation, the old PM, the New York Post and the Daily Compass, published his legendary one-man I. F. Stone`s Weekly from 1953 to 1972 and then, in his late 60s, took up ancient Greek to write-not so incongruous for one devoted to the Socratic method-his recent ``The Trial of Socrates.``

Stone`s approach was the opposite of the `80s Washington celebrity journalist. He stayed away from dinner parties, stuck to primary sources like the Congressional Record, the New York Times and Facts on File-scrutinized them with his idiosyncratic vision of national and world affairs and reassembled the pieces of the puzzle in a way that no one else did.

Stone`s ``The Hidden History of the Korean War`` is now being republished after 36 years. Rereading this almost novelistic volume, one is struck more than anything by how closely Stone`s version of the war then raging resembles what we now read about the conflict in Vietnam. He shows that the U. S. government does not always tell the truth, that grubby domestic political questions can have too much to do with the making of war, that great leaders can make stupid mistakes, that napalm dumped for reasons of superpower politics on Third World peoples can leave a bitter and dangerous legacy.

In the wake of Vietnam, all of this may seem old hat or, alternatively, merely fashionable. What the reader must remember, however, is the

independence and courage that it took for Stone to write such things in 1952, when many called him a crackpot or a traitor.

The reader of the `80s also is struck by how, more than with most journalists of the period, Stone`s attention was focused on what was geniunely important about the war.

He probes the degree to which American involvement in Korea was compelled by fear of the American Right on the part of a Democratic President, Harry Truman: ``The Fair Deal, like the New Deal, was denounced as `communistic.`

How better disprove this charge than by active hostility to Moscow?``

Of a briefing by the Air Force on its obliteration of a city with

``jellied gasoline bombs`` amid reports of a Chinese withdrawal ``pending high-level diplomatic moves,`` he wrote: ``There is an indifference to human suffering to be read between those lines which makes me as an American deeply ashamed of what was done that day at Sinuiju. . . . If the Chinese were even abandoning their dams, they must have wanted peace badly. Was the mass raid intended to goad them to war? . . . A terrible retribution threatened the peoples of the Western world who so feebly permitted such acts to be done in their name.``

Was the attack that started the war on June 25, 1950 so unexpected? Stone writes of South Korean provocations in 1949 and of the newly ousted Chiang Kai-shek`s motive and power to help make trouble on the Korean peninsula.

As with Lyndon Johnson and the Tonkin Gulf incident, was the Truman administration entirely displeased when the enemy made its move? Was Joseph Stalin so reckless in Korea? Stone notes Soviet restraint in responding to such American attacks as the bombing of an airbase near Vladivostok.

This is not to suggest, by any means, that Stone was always right. Skeptics and revisionists almost always make the mistake of erring on the side of hyperbole, and Stone is no exception.

To Stone, the danger from Moscow in 1950 was just a ``Red scare,`` which gave Harry Truman ``an easy way to obtain from Congress those expenditures he needed to `prime the pump` of prosperity, first by relief and reconstruction abroad, then by rearmament. Those who would not be moved by pity or moral obligation to alleviate suffering abroad could be frightened into

appropriations by fear of Communism.``

Stone portrays an American government terminally afraid of peace. ``This dread was dictating the actions of the politicians and business leaders. An economy accustomed to ever-larger injections of inflationary narcotic trembled at the thought that its deadly stimulant might be shut off.``

Stone did not always have the right answers, but he usually asked the right questions. Mainstream journalists came to emulate Stone when American government lies and mistakes in Vietnam became so obvious that the old way of reportage would not do. Now in his 80s, Stone can take pleasure from the fact that what seemed slightly dotty in 1952 has become something of a model for contemporary reporters.

For Stone`s view of the Second World War and the Truman period, readers can turn to ``The War Years`` ($18.95) and ``The Truman Era`` ($17.95), which are being published along with ``Hidden History.``